Walking counselling

Walking counselling is just this – walking and talking about your problems, worries or concerns, as well as, or instead of, sitting in the counselling room together.

Like any exercise, walking can really help when we feel stressed or when we’re feeling overloaded with our thoughts and feelings. Fresh air can give us energy and connecting with nature and open space can help free the mind and give us a new perspective, changing how we feel.

My walking counselling gives you another option; it’s suitable for whatever you’d like to discuss or work through, and the type of counselling you’ll receive is the same, but being outdoors and more flexible, exactly how we do it might be different.

What we talk about would be led by you – physically as well, because you’ll set the pace at which we walk. You might want to walk with sand under your feet, be up high on a cliff path, make your way round a reservoir, or through a wood.

This type of counselling might suit you if you’re an outdoors person, or if you find exercise makes a difference to how you feel, but you don’t find the time to do it. It may work for you if you don’t like the thought of sitting face-to-face in a counselling room, or it could perhaps be a new challenge for you if you don’t like open spaces.

Our first session would be in the counselling room to talk about how it might work best for you. We’d then consider what type of walk, how long you’d like it to be and what we do in bad weather. It might be that we don the waterproofs and walk whatever the weather, or if you’d prefer, we can revert to the counselling room.

Counselling with nature

Space can be really important and we can feel different outdoors with the freedom this offers. Temperature and weather may affect us too and different places will have an impact on what we think and feel.

It might be that you want to just be among nature for your counselling. We don’t have to be walking – we can just sit outside instead. There might be a place of importance for you, or somewhere that is relevant to the issue/s you want to work through.

You may want to work therapeutically with nature itself – creating something, or doing something with whatever we come across, for example. Anything is possible and we can find a way that works for you.